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On January 31, 1968, Lan Cao’s family was living just outside of Saigon, getting ready to celebrate the Lunar New Year of Tet. Instead, her father —a military commander—had to rush off to war.

The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong had launched a surprise attack on her city and over one hundred other South Vietnamese locations. This became known as the Tet Offensive, and was one of the biggest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, which led to a decline in public support in the United States.

Lan was 7 years old. She and her family would eventually resettle in the US. Lan graduated magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke and earned a law degree from Yale. She’s now a professor of international economics law and lives in California.

At StoryCorps, Lan sat down with her teenage daughter, Harlan Van Cao. Harlan was 12 at the time of their interview — just a year shy of the age Lan was when she arrived in the United States. Lan shared what it was like to live under siege before rebuilding her life in America.

This interview came through the First Days Story Project, recorded in partnership with WGBH and PBS American Experience.

Produced by StoryCorps. Originally aired February 2, 2018, on NPR’s Morning Edition.

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The StoryCorps Archive comprises one of the largest collections of human voices, featuring more than 400,000 individuals sharing their stories. In our beta launch, only interviews recorded using the StoryCorps App are searchable on this site.

All interviews are preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.